Vicess - Princess of Vice

It's like those first few seconds when you wake up, but less confusing, like you're suddenly entering a different reality again... something familiar, or something shocking, depending on the hit. And just like when you first wake up, sometimes the words trail out of your mouth without you even intending to speak them, like you're finishing a sentence you said in a distant dream. And similar to in your dreams, you have what seems like a fuzz of uncertainty around everything that happens, not everything makes sense but you don't really mind at all. You don't mind about much, it's hard to force emotions when your senses are dulled to relaxation. It's like waking up in the middle of the night to find that the person you usually sleep next to isn't there this evening, everything moves slowly and people come in and out without you even realising. And your eyes are loose and tranquil, a sleep needed for slumber.

So, we take drugs to feel like we are asleep. And once you've felt that life, you don't want to be awake anymore. Real experiences seem so slow and dismal to the mind.

He hates it when I revert to my older ways. A fairly simple man, he is most content with a computer, a game and a pack of 20 Benson & Hedges. He doesn't like me to distract him while he immerses himself in his games, and it reflects his need to be unbothered throughout his life.

There have been occasions, since he fell in love with me, when he has held my hair back as I vomit. He's always been patient and understanding. In the darkness on the first night that we had sex, I crawled out of bed and smoked heroin as he lay waiting for me to return. At this point he was silently unhappy, as he felt he had no cause or right to be openly angry at me. He was merely appreciative to have a female body to hold, whether she was here or in a different realm of reality.

He hasn't spoken to me since yesterday, when he found me lying on the bathroom floor at lunch time, looking like an idiot, most likely with saliva drooling from the corner of my mouth and my eyes half-closed in a gormless fashion.

"For fuck's sake," he barked, shaking his head and storming out.

"You knew what I was when you got together with me!" I screamed out after him, pitifully, perhaps feeling remorse but being unable to retract my movements.

Because when I'm unhappy, I am a fool. I am so set on destroying my life that I simply do not care.

But this is what I do. I recover, I live, and then I slip back again.

But when I feel normal again, I will resolve to let that be the last time, at least for now, for a few weeks - just so that I can have Jack's friendship again.

I don't forgive myself for the black hole in my timeline that I can't recover. Sometimes, I wonder exactly what happened during this period, whether I missed anything important, whether there was a smile that I should have remembered, or an important life lesson that I should have learnt.

Instead, I came out of the other side without even acknowleding that there had been a black hole at first. In the rehab clinic, the nurse told me that I was lucky to be alive from the amount of heroin I had consumed. "You won't believe how many addicts kill themselves just by not knowing their limits," she said.

Yes. I actually do.

But there was some point in my life where I knew that heroin would kill me one day, and I just hoped to God that it would be sooner rather than later. I went on a manic path of destruction, killing every shred of life that I had along the way.

I met Jen at a strip club before I had even progressed past cannabis. She was a pole dancer, and a dear friend to my dear friends, and I was mesmerised by her. I sat in awe while she shimmied and shook around the pole, and in my drunken state, I thought she was Angelina Jolie - her long brown hair shaking raunchily behind her, her luscious lips pouting suggestively. I was not a lesbian, but at that moment, I thought I must have been.

I was obsessed with her for weeks following our first meeting. Her confidence and charisma radiated from her in ways that made her, to me, an untouchable sex goddess. I knew that she was promiscuous just because of her job, she was paid to be naughty. Yet, I was positive she wouldn't be for me. And it drove me crazy.

Many things happened between, but on one particularly sad day, Jen grabbed me by the hand and told me that we had wasted enough time. This wasn't in reference to the lack of sex that we'd had. It was in reference to the time in life that we had wasted trying to sober up.

"Let's just do it," she said. "Let's go out with a bang."

The plan was to leave this place and go somewhere new, where we would spend the last few days of our lives in obliterated happiness, barely able to crane our own necks from the ground with the heavy weight of heroin lulling us into happy slumbers.

We found ourselves in a flat, "slumming it". We had all of the drugs that we would need, and we set on our suicide mission. Two days later, a pack of rogue tramps squatted in our place of death, their sleeping bags laid out at the opposite end of the room, and they huddled together as they slept to keep warm.

During the evenings, we lit tealight candles and shared stories with the tramps, listening to their tales of woe and off-loading our own.

And then it all went black. For three months, apparently. The next thing I knew, I was in rehab. I had been wandering around in life for three months, and I couldn't remember any of it. I went home to my family, I had some sex, and I even wrote some stuff.

And to this day, I have the odd flash back that I guess could be linked to the pitch-black days of my life, but I still have no accurate memories of anything that happened from the day I was talking to the tramps to the day I woke up in agony on the hospital bed, the nurse wiping my vomit from the sheets beside me as she sang "Ave Maria" in an off-tune and husky voice.

I will never forgive myself for the three months of my life that I lost and yet I found myself - just last night - venturing to a place that I knew would serve me well.

Hello, old friend.

"I have a question to ask," I said. "It's quite important to me, really."

"Sure," he answers, his eyes flicking between my face and the computer screen. Now is the time to point out that Jack has an extremely bad gaming addiction.

"Do you remember when you told me I wouldn't be a very good comedian? Why was that?" I asked.

He pondered for a moment, shrugging. "You are funny, I didn't mean to offend you with that. I just don't think women can be funny in a comedian sense."

"Then how am I funny?" I asked.

"You are eccentric," he explained. "You do good facial expressions, or you say funny things, spur-of-the-moment. Women just aren't good comedians."

"Why though?" I asked. His sexism has bothered me previously, though I'm accustomed now.

"Women are funny to other women," he explained. "You tell jokes about periods and how men don't understand you, and you find those jokes funny."

"So, if I was to be a comedian that never talked about periods or men, could I be funny?" I wondered aloud.

"No," he admitted. "I just think I will never find a woman funny."

"What about writing?" I asked. "What about comic writing?"

By this point, I was turning his chair to face me so that I had his full attention, which was quite a struggle. My need for attention, versus the computer game. I was losing.

"Could you be a comic writer, you mean?" he asked.

"Yes," I stated.

"I don't know," he shrugged. "I don't find books funny."

"Not even John O'Farrell?" I asked, flabbergasted.

"Even comedy books aren't funny," he shrugged. "Women find them funny..."

"Why do they?" I asked.

"Well, if it was a book about periods and men that don't understand, all the women in the world would buy it," he shrugged. May the record state I have never purchased a book about periods and ignorant men.

"So what about me?" I asked. "Could I write good comedy that the masses would like?"

"As long as it was about men and periods, yes," he decided. "You will only write good comedy that other women will enjoy about periods."

The first time I had a period, I was quite proud. I ran in to my mum's bedroom, and told her about the new guest in my underwear. My mum has always been quite proud of her menstruation, telling anybody within earshot, so I thought we would bond.

The next day at school, a spotty boy pointed as a small speckle of red blood on my granny tights and made a huge declaration: "She's on her period!" It seemed that by the end of the day, every person in the school had been made aware of my menstrual cycle. Girls who weren't as developed yet were the worst, thinking it hilarious to call me rude names like "Jam ragger" and "ketchup minge". I cringe just at the thought.

So don't blame me if, on my first attempts at comedy literature, I don't choose to write about periods.

School consumed so little of my time as a teenager, partly due to the low level of attendance that I had, and the amount of my days spent "playing truant" at home.

It wasn't always intentional. Sometimes, I would wake up in the morning, wait until my parents had left for their full-time jobs, and then decide on a final twenty minutes or so in bed until I had to walk into lessons. I would wake up at lunch time and decide that it would be worse to be so ridiculously late than to miss the entire day.

Eventually, it became intentional. After so many successful dodges, I knew exactly how to miss my lessons without being reprimanded. And I had my friends - a couple of years older than me and either unemployed or laid-back college students, and of course my new drug addiction, which almost definitely contributed to my need to be lazy and uneducated. School just kept me occupied and away from the moments in life that I felt most essential to my happiness.

But eventually, letters were sent home, and it was only for so long that I could put a spin on the situation, or trick my parents into thinking that it was days that they had allowed me to miss. Soon, my mum was driving me to school each morning - a last ditch attempt to get me into my lessons on time.

Sometimes, I would go to school, smoke heroin in the toilets before my lessons, and then sit bleary-eyed and semi-conscious whilst teachers tried to teach me. Other times, I would wait until mum was out of sight, slump over to the bus stop, and then pay a fare to take me straight back home, where I would spend the day nourishing myself with poison and intoxicants until my parents go home to find me in deep slumber, strung out from the day behind.

Yet, nobody caught on that I was a junkie.

I believe, on my parent's part, that it was sheer selfishness that made them ignorant to my habits. My father was a drug user himself, smoking bags of cannabis each evenings, clouding the lounge in a haze of sweetly scented smoke. My mother was an alcoholic, though not overly so, but she would easily down a bottle of wine or two each evening. They despised eachother, and this ritual was the only way that they could cope with their own marriage. But this escapism that they found only allowed my own problems to go unnoticed and masked behind the piles of wine bottles and overfilled marijuana ashtrays.

On the school's part, it was ignorance. They didn't want the school's ratings to fall, it was a highly reputable school that were close to becoming a recognized business college. They didn't want to have to deal with the extra funding that they would need to investigate the situation, to see how far my corruption had spread.

It hadn't spread at all. Not once while I was at school did I attempt to make friendships with any of the others in my year. On numerous occasions, girls would try to speak to me, mostly to ask about Dom and the others that met me at the gates. Curiosity, they said. I saw darker motives. If they knew about my relationship with Dom, understanding it to it's full extent, they would try and seek out the pitfalls or problems and exploit them to their best advantage.

They didn't think the shy and unsociable girl that nobody liked deserved a boyfriend as attractive as Dom. They thought Dom was an older boy, probably had a car or was at least having driving lessons, and maybe even had a job to buy them presents. He looked quite old, so if they were with him they could probably get into night clubs. And he was a trophy boyfriend, that they could wear as a handbag until he got boring or the relationship demanded they actually made an effort.

I hated them. I hated the boys that followed them around like puppy dogs, desperately hoping for their attention. I hated the teachers. And I hated everything about school.

So I was not happy to find Anicka at Kit's house, four years on from my school days, randomly dancing into my life.

She was in my biology class, she had an unusual need to know all of my secrets. We had argued on a few occasions where she had tried to make me respond to her during lessons. She had never learned anything about my life, but she had informed me on numerous occasions that she had been telling "the others" that I was quite nice after all, and that we were "quite good friends". I had hated her like I hated the others, only I hated her a bit more, because she rused my from my drugged sleep during lessons.

Anicka was the kind of girl that gave blow jobs in the boy's toilets and then bragged about it afterwards. I wonder if any boy ever touched her back, perhaps to make the deal a bit more fair. Anicka was quite proud of the fact that she had given over ten blow jobs at the age of fifteen. When she lost her virginity on her sixteenth birthday, she told me that blood filled the bedsheets and her mother knew instantly that she had been deflowered, as she was walking uncomfortably with her legs open for the next three days. She gave me the rather graphic details of the bruising between her legs. I was traumatized and horrified at the imagery.

When I saw her there, four years later, she had just returned from a date with Kit. She was his calibre of girl, and I knew that they were a match made in heaven, but I was still surprised to find her there.

The first thing I did was thank her, as if it hadn't been for her and her gorey "first time", I probably would have started having sex a lot sooner.